


Gravity

by thedevilchicken



Category: Furious 7 (2015), The Expendables (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Breathplay, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Fight Sex, Fights, Guns, Identity Issues, Knives, M/M, Missions, Post-Canon, Scars, Sexual Content, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:45:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5159177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Owen wakes up, he doesn't remember. So Deckard takes a chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



“What do you mean, he doesn’t remember?”

The doctor looked about fit to collapse she was so pale, stood there by the starkly empty nurses’ station. He was holding a gun to her head so he supposed he understood her reaction.

“It’s retrograde amnesia,” she said, unsteady, as if that answered the question and didn’t just add to it. “He doesn’t remember.”

“ _What_ doesn’t he remember? Where he is? How he got here? _What_?”

“He didn’t even know his name until the police told him, Mr Shaw,” said the doctor. “He might never remember. There’s just no way to tell at this point.”

Deckard nodded; he pulled the trigger and the doctor dropped down dead to the floor. He’d almost thought they’d learn but there he was again, another half-destroyed hospital ward, another special ops team strewn across the building and his suit was still pristine but for a couple of flecks of bloody and honestly, it looked like part of the weave. They hadn’t learned. In a way, it was almost sad. 

He strode into Owen’s room. The TV was still on and Owen was still watching it absently, perfectly calm, Chelsea playing Arsenal at Stamford Bridge which explained the crap traffic he’d got stuck in on the way there. He hadn’t missed that about London. To be fair, the only thing he missed about London was his brother and his brother apparently didn’t know him from Adam. 

Owen looked at him and he didn’t bother putting the gun behind his back, out of sight. Owen didn’t seem particularly put about by it, but then he never had before so maybe that hadn’t changed, at least. Maybe it was a good sign. Hopeful. Maybe his little brother was still in there somewhere. Of course, his little brother was thirty-six years old so _little_ was probably overkill. Deckard did a lot of that where Owen was concerned.

“It was you causing all that fuss?” Owen said. He looked gaunt, pale, needed a good shave and a good barber because his usually short hair was almost long enough to curl around his ears but weeks in a coma and then months in a hospital after he’d finally woken up could do that to a man, he supposed. He’d seen him look worse. There’d been times in the past that he’d made him look worse. When all the machines had still been hooked up, he’d looked worse. 

“Yeah, it was me.”

“So, are you here to kill me or to break me out?”

“It’s a hospital, you soft twat. You don’t break out of a sodding hospital.”

“Then what were the boys in the fetching black flak jackets doing here?”

“Well, let’s say they weren’t exactly here to keep you in.”

Owen raised his brows, still sitting there in the hospital bed in his crap NHS pyjamas. “They were here to keep you out,” he said, looking something like moderately impressed. Deckard nodded curtly. “Who are you? Should I be concerned?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not a thing.”

He went closer and he held out a hand that Owen took quite willingly, and they shook. And perhaps he should’ve told him _I’m your brother, you prat, who the fuck else do you think is going to go through this amount of crap for you?_ , maybe he should’ve said _I’m Deckard Shaw_ and let him work it out for himself, but he didn’t. He saw a chance and he took it, hoping faintly that it wasn’t all going to end in tears the way things usually did between them. 

“Lee Christmas,” he said, Owen’s hand in his, his handshake firm. “I’m here to get you out of the country.”

“Owen Shaw,” Owen replied, and he swung his legs out of bed. “Or so the boys from the Met like to tell me. Shall we?”

They left together, the roar of the away fans at an Arsenal goal the only sound in the whole damn place but their footsteps. They were the only two left alive who weren’t cowering.

And so it began. 

\---

They left England on a ferry with a pair of well-forged German passports and a BMW with German plates that tied in neatly with their current IDs. Deckard put the radio on so Owen couldn’t ask too many awkward questions as they drove straight down to Dover and the ferry across to Calais, and then they went up on deck, stood out by the railing in the chilly October air wearing suits and coats that Deckard had stowed in the boot of the Beamer. Owen leant against the rail; all his outward injuries had healed while Deckard had been banged up in that nameless hole of an unsanctioned penitentiary, but he still wasn’t all the way there just then. He was still limping just a bit if you knew how to look for it, and he still looked like he could do with getting a few hot meals in him.

It was strange seeing him like that, Deckard thought; it reminded him of the time Owen had broken his leg dicking about on top of next door’s too-high garden wall, when the neighbours’ dog had started barking and he’d fallen off through the greenhouse. It’d been a miracle that eight-year-old Owen Shaw hadn’t been killed that day, but he’d got out it with a fracture and a few cuts and bruises and a couple of days in the children’s ward before they’d put the cast on and sent him back out into polite society. It was a miracle thirty-something Owen Shaw hadn’t been killed in that stunt with the fucking plane, but he’d come out of it with a bit of a temporary limp and a side dish of amnesia. Then again, given their line of work, it was more or less miraculous either of them had made it upwards of thirty.

“So, you want me to believe _Christmas_ isn’t an alias,” Owen said, as they say in the crappy ferry café drinking crappy ferry coffee, picking at dry croissants. 

“Never said it wasn’t,” Deckard told him, finally giving up on the pastry in disgust when if flaked all over his chin and got shredded in his stubble so he had to brush it off with his cuff. “I just said it’s what people call me.”

“And which people would those be?”

“People I know. People I work with.”

“Do we work together?”

Deckard took a sip of his dire cappuccino, flakes of croissant floating sadly on the top, and watched Owen over the top of it. “Yeah, sometimes,” he said. “When it suits.” Which was true enough, even if it wasn’t even in the same county as the whole truth.

They drove out of Calais and over the border to Belgium, into the Netherlands and then Germany where they checked into a moderately pricey hotel in Hamburg, not enough to raise eyebrows but he’d had enough of crap hotels over the years and around the world to last a lifetime. Owen surprised himself when he realised he spoke German like a native and Deckard resisted the urge to tell him he’d completely bombed his German GCSE so big brother had always thought it was some sort of deal with the devil that’d led to him eventually speaking five languages. They’d both done Maths, Physics and Chemistry A levels at the local sixth form before they’d hopped into the Army, Deckard first, Owen after uni maybe a decade or so later. Learning how to ask directions to the town hall or buy beer and Bratwurst or what-the-fuck-ever had never seemed like a particularly solid use of their time at school. They’d had other plans.

“Don’t trust me in a room of my own?” Owen asked once they’d checked in, as he settled himself down on one of the fairly sizeable twin beds and rubbed at his hip. Apparently the hip had been the problem, something about pins and titanium that was in Owen’s file and Deckard would get around to reading it sooner or later, once they were out of Europe. It wasn’t the first time he’d helped himself to his brother’s medical notes over the years, after all. It just usually wasn’t at gunpoint.

He locked the door, put on the security chain and shoved a chair up under the handle like a proper paranoid twat, then glanced at Owen for a second as he crossed the room to draw the curtains. Owen was watching him; it was hard to tell if he was trying to dream up a plan to slip away in the night or if the thought he’d stay just to find out what ‘Lee Christmas’ knew about his life before the amnesia. It didn’t sound like the fellas from the Met had told him fuck all, so he had to have a few burning questions. 

“We’re not exactly in the clear here,” Deckard told him once the curtains were closed, as he sat himself down on the other bed. “The team of fellas with gund was there for me but don’t tell me you didn’t notice you’d got a couple of coppers sitting on their arses outside your door round the clock.”

“I noticed,” Owen said, glancing at him as they both pulled off their suit jackets and started loosening ties. “What exactly did I do?” He narrowed his eyes, though Deckard thought somehow he looked faintly amused with it. “What did _you_ do?”

“We pissed some people off,” Deckard said. “You’ve always been good at that.”

Then they went to bed and they barely slept, either of them. Deckard was relieved the plan had worked so far but there was still a whole marathon of a way to go and fuck, the last time he’d seen his brother he’d been in a damn coma; maybe Owen didn’t remember who the fuck he was but that didn’t make it any less bloody miraculous that he’d ever woken up and okay, listening to him breathe made him feel like a total prick, but at least he knew he was alive. Deckard didn’t let himself think maybe he was half glad he had no memory. Meant he couldn’t remember the last time they’d both been in the same room and both been conscious. 

In the morning they went north, over the border into Denmark and then a ferry from Helsingor to Helsingborg, over the water in Sweden. By the afternoon they were where they needed to be and sat in a café drinking yet more crap coffee as they waited impatiently. Deckard was wearing a gun in a shoulder holster under his mac and Owen kept looking at that spot like he was thinking of shooting him every moment they were there together, except he’d seen the bodies back at the hospital and maybe thought better of making a move for it because of that. Maybe he didn’t know if he could make it before he got his brains smeared all over the chipped tabletop or not. Maybe he didn’t know what Deckard - what _Lee Christmas_ \- would do if he tried it. But mostly, Owen looked intrigued.

“So, where are you taking me?” Owen asked, offhand, over his coffee, as he glanced at Deckard’s mac for the thirtieth time. 

“The States,” Deckard said. 

“You live there?”

“Yeah.”

“Do I?”

“No.”

“Then where _do_ I live?”

“Last I heard? Monaco.”

“So why aren’t we going to Monaco?”

Deckard sighed. “Because you tried to make off with a nightshade device and got yourself thrown out of a plane by the Diplomatic Security Service,” he said. “I could draw you a diagram but you’re a clever boy, Owen, you’ll work it out.”

Owen looked right on the edge of amused that collapsed over into pissed off, maybe almost enough to go for Deckard’s gun after all, but in the end he didn’t. Small mercies, Deckard thought. He wasn’t sure what he’d’ve done if he had.

“Well, I’m sure I sound like a very naughty boy,” Owen said, sarcastic about it, eyeballing Deckard over the table, then he shut the fuck up instead of pressing on and they ordered another couple of coffees just to pass the time. It was almost the same as it’d always been, antagonistic and irritating almost to the point of handbags at dawn.

They drove out onto the airfield just after dark and the plane came in right on schedule, a hulking turboprop piece of shit that looked like something out of a low budget war film and the refuelling was just finishing up when they strolled out to it. Owen wasn’t looking at him but took a step in closer to him anyway, hanging back off his shoulder, and he could see why: all six of the guys loitering there around the plane had a gun or at least a knife strapped to one thigh or both, like an air strip in the middle of Swedish nowhere was likely to be crawling with bad guys but who knew, stranger things had happened. Stranger things had happened to all of them, not that Owen was presently aware of that.

“Don’t you fucking dare go for my gun,” Deckard muttered, with a quick glance back over his shoulder. “No one’s gonna shoot you, you prat. They’re my team.”

And they didn’t shoot. Barney waved them over with a smile and Deckard ushered Owen up on board while Gunner and Caesar looked over their fancy suits with a whistle, so he told them to go fuck themselves and they closed the hatch. And once Owen was settled on a bench next to Smilee and the fellas were as clear as they could be that they shouldn’t antagonise the intriguing new arrival, Deckard took his seat next to Barney in the cockpit. He knew Owen was flashing him something close to a scowl as he went; the plane wasn’t exactly Concorde and the lads weren’t exactly leggy blonde trolley dollies.

Barney looked at him sideways as they pulled up off the tarmac and into the air. 

“You get what you came for?” Barney asked. 

“Yeah,” Deckard replied. “Thanks for the pick-up, Barn.”

“Yeah, no problem,” he said. “Remind me to take the fuel out of your cut on the next job.”

Deckard settled back in the co-pilot’s seat with an absent, wry shake of his head and they pulled up higher, took a leisurely turn and Deckard watched Barney fix their heading out toward the Atlantic. He couldn’t say he’d regret leaving Europe behind.

“He really can’t remember?” Barney asked, some time later, hours later, while the fellas were still intermittently eyeing Owen somewhere in the back between rounds of Gunner’s snoring that somehow wasn’t drowned by the engines. “I mean, I’d say he’s a lucky son of a bitch if he’s forgotten _your_ ugly ass, but...”

Deckard nodded. “Yeah, he really can’t remember,” he said, and he sighed. “Let’s hope to Christ it stays that way.”

\---

Sometimes, Deckard Shaw lacked foresight. Apparently the night they landed back at what passed for home there on US soil marked off one of those times because like a gigantic arse he’d neglected to consider ongoing modes of transportation. 

Owen followed him out of the plane looking what the rest of the lads must’ve thought seemed eerily calm but Deckard could tell he was about thirty seconds away from vicious bloody murder - not surprising in present company, Galgo running his mouth and Gunner having snored halfway across the Atlantic. And that was when Deckard, Lee, what-the-fuck-ever he was meant to be calling himself now all this had got dredged up again, realised what he’d got there in the hangar waiting to get them back to his place was his sexy little motorcycle. 

Owen eyed it and then eyed him. Deckard shrugged; most of his crap was stowed in the plane anyway so he grabbed one of the spare parachuting helmets out of the cargo hold and tossed it to Owen, then he swung a suited leg over the bike and patted the seat behind him. Owen looked less than impressed by the prospect but did as he was bidden with a stiff limp; apparently his hip hadn’t been helped by the long flight. Deckard pulled on his helmet and swore colourfully under his breath inside it as he revved the engine and Owen took a second to settle his hands at the front of Deckard’s hips. He squeezed absently or maybe not quite so absently and Deckard swore another blue streak. They must’ve looked a right pair of twats in their expensive suits on a motorbike that wasn’t really made for two blokes their size, but that was what he had.

Barney gave him a fucker of a look as they took off into the dark, three parts _watch your ass_ and four parts _you’re such a dumb shit for bringing him here, don’t blame me when it turns into a horror show_. He guessed he agreed on both counts. It’d be just like Israel and what happened after that all over again if he let it. 

Of course, Deckard’s place only had one bedroom ‘cause he’d never needed that much space before, even when Lacy had been around. And yeah, so ordinarily he’d just’ve said fuck it and told Owen to couch surf or get fucked, Owen was Owen and not Yin when he’d needed a place to crash or Caesar for that godforsaken fortnight when his apartment had been full of roaches, so he changed the sheets on the bed and he gestured inside. 

“Take the bedroom,” he said. 

Owen fairly fucking sauntered in past him without so much as a word and Deckard stretched out on the couch with a deep, hefty sigh.

Having Owen in the apartment with him was going to be a glorious mistake, and he supposed he’d known it would be even though he hadn’t really planned past the plane ride out of Europe. The problem was, he couldn’t think of any other way to be sure he wasn’t getting locked up with the key chucked into the nearest canal or possibly extradited as a fucking terrorist and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let the Yanks ship him to Gitmo or drop him down that deep, dark hole of a jail where the DSS had left him not too long ago. He was his brother, for Christ’s sake, whatever else had happened. And he certainly didn’t fall asleep that night thinking about a bike ride with Owen’s hands at his waist.

“You do realise I don’t have any clothes, don’t you?” Owen said the following morning, emerging from the bathroom damp-haired and shaved and wearing nothing but his underwear. “Except for the suit, and something tells me I won’t be needing that with any particular urgency.”

So Deckard sighed as he pulled on his jeans and then dragged out some sweats and a t-shirt, underwear, socks. Owen stripped down right then and there with Deckard still in the room; Deckard decided it was his turn to hit the shower and what he was doing was _not_ fleeing. Not at all. He hadn’t thought this through, no, but he was _not_ running for the hills.

Mid-morning, Barney called. He had sod all to say for a start - Deckard supposed he was just checking his wayward, amnesiac brother hadn’t offed him in the night - and then mentioned a job, something he was going to take care of with Smilee and Luna down in Mexico and Deckard knew what he was saying without actually saying it: if he wanted him to stay, he’d stay. He’d send Caesar or Toll or fuck, he’d toss the job to Trench and have done with it, he’d come over and he’d take up residence in Deckard’s armchair and he’d stand guard against late-night shivvings if that was what it took. 

“I appreciate the sentiment, you soppy arse, but he’s not gonna gut me with a steak knife,” Deckard told him. 

“Bread knife?” Barney suggested. 

Deckard snorted. “Yeah, sod off on your fishing trip and you can check if I’m still alive and kicking when you get back.”

He put down the phone. Owen was looking at him, standing in the bedroom doorway with his arms crossed over his chest and an amused quirk to his lips. 

“Steak knife?” Owen said. He was holding one of Deckard’s - one of _Lee’s_ \- knife belts in his hands and he uncrossed his arms to dangle them dramatically as he crossed the room. “Frankly, I think I could do more damage with these. You have an arsenal in your closet, Mr Christmas. I’m starting to think I’ve gone home with a serial killer.”

He draped the belt with its neat rows of sharp, perfectly weighted knives over the back of Lee’s - Deckard’s - who-the-fuck-ever’s - worn leather sofa. 

“Mercenary,” Deckard said. 

“I’m sorry?”

“Mercenary,” he repeated. “I’m a merc. Y’know, gun for hire. Soldier of fortune.”

“It looks a lot more like you’re a _knife_ for hire,” Owen said, not that he looked perturbed by the thought.

“Depends on the job. And it’s Lee. Fuck’s sake don’t call me Mr Christmas, it makes me sound like a bloody Mr Man.”

Owen chuckled drily and sat himself down on the sofa; he picked up the knife belt and pulled out a blade and just for a second Deckard wondered what he was planning to do with it - maybe test its edge and cut himself, test its weight and balance in his hand, maybe turn and jab him in the chest with it and he found himself preparing for that eventuality because it wasn’t like he was blind to the fact that his brother wasn’t exactly shy of violence. But what he did was pause for a moment then aim for the dartboard strung up there on the back of the kitchen door. The knife hung on for a second then fell to the floor with a clatter. 

“You were always crap at that,” Deckard said. 

Owen raised his brows. “Always?”

“As long as I’ve known you.”

“How long is that?” 

“A long time. Too long.”

“And you’re better than I am?”

Deckard stepped forward and took a knife from the belt in Owen’s hands. And he knew he was showing off like a bloody fool but he turned and released and watched as the knife sank straight into the bullseye. He’d done it enough times to have practically worn out the board and the backing he’d put behind it to keep from gouging the crap out of the defenceless kitchen door, though there were definitely knife marks in the paintwork anyway.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Owen said.

“Well, I’ve had practice.”

“And I’ve not?”

Deckard frowned, and after a moment he took a seat next to him on the sofa, though just looking at the piece of shit furniture he’d spent the night on made his neck ache.

“Look, what do you want me to tell you?” he asked. 

“You could start with who I am,” Owen said. “Then you could move on to who you are and what the hell I’m doing here.”

And it was a reasonable request. The problem was that Deckard had not the first idea what to tell him without _telling_ him. So he pushed back up off the sofa like that didn’t make him look like a truly gigantic arse and he walked away without a word. 

He went out and he left him there. Maybe he was hoping he’d be gone when he got back, hours later, and maybe he wasn’t but he wasn’t gone; Owen was asleep in his bed. He pushed down the drunken urge to join him.

\---

In the morning, over breakfast, he started telling Owen stories about his life before the coma - the safe ones, at least. Apparently a night at Barney’s place getting shit-faced on cheap whiskey had been just exactly what he’d needed to fumble his way at least part of the way around the elephant in the room, though the metaphor fell down just a tad because Owen didn’t know there _was_ an elephant in the room. Fucking invisible elephants, fucking shit up.

He didn’t sugar-coat it. He could’ve, maybe, made it sound like he’d been hard done by as a kid and so nothing he’d done had been his fault, his mother had died giving birth to him, his father had been an alcoholic arse who’d left him to be brought up by someone else, anyone else, whoever was around, but boo fucking hoo, Owen was who he was in spite of all that crap, not because of it. So he told him he’d been in the SAS, told him he’d pissed off out of it to go into business for himself and told him that business hadn’t even been in the vicinity of legal. He told him he’d killed people and he’d never seemed particularly remorseful about it and to his credit, Owen didn’t seem to take it badly. 

“So, I’m a bit like you,” he said, and took a bite of his overcooked bacon. It splintered and fell onto his plate with a clatter; Deckard had never been a great cook.

“A bit, yeah,” Deckard agreed, or conceded, or something like that. 

“But not a mercenary.”

“Sometimes.” Deckard took a sip of his coffee then set it back down again. “Not always.” 

“Were you always a mercenary?” 

“Not always, no.”

“So you were SAS, too. That’s how we know each other?” 

“That’s one way of putting it.” 

Owen gave up from exasperation and went to dump his plate in the sink. Deckard was relieved, because apparently circumnavigation of the bloody elephant hadn’t included question time, but he knew that Owen’s exasperation wouldn’t overshadow his damn curiosity for long. 

He really hadn’t thought it through, as it turned out. He’d got Owen out of the UK and over to the States and that was as far as the plan had gone and while Owen took up stretching on an exercise mat under the living room window, between the crappy weight bench and the treadmill that was nearly as old as Barney was, Deckard realised he needed a plan. But then Barney called on a crackly line and said the job had gone south and okay, he knew it was a bad time, but fuck, they needed backup. Pronto. Of course they did. There was no such thing as an easy op.

So he left. He grabbed Gunner and Galgo and they flew down to Mexico on the next commercial flight because damnit, all of them could fly but Barney had taken the plane. Gunner made unconvincing passes at the flight attendant and Galgo rabbited on like every passing thought just erupted straight out of his mouth and that did _not_ improve once they were in a Spanish-speaking country, it just got _faster_ somehow till Deckard had an urge to clamp his hand over Galgo’s mouth and nose and fucking smother him till he stopped bleating. But his passport said _Lee Christmas_ and that shit was _not_ Lee. He wondered what’d happened to his old UK passport, the one that had his real name on it. It was probably deep in some shitty MOD vault in case they ever caught him.

They dug Barney and Luna and Smilee out of their damn hole and Deckard knew everyone was looking at him sideways as they made their way back to the plane because he’d gone straight in with two handguns drawn instead of his knives and just shot the holy fucking shit out of everything and everyone there. Gunner had seemed to enjoy it. That didn’t bode well. 

“Calm your shit down, Lee,” Barney told him once they were up in the air. “Take a breath. Get laid. Do some yoga.”

Deckard nodded tersely. He knew he needed to find some damn calm, but fuck he objected to being told so. That was fine because Lee would’ve, too.

He took a detour on the way home, got back maybe twelve hours after the others because there was something he had to take care of. Barney said nothing about it, but Deckard knew he vaguely disapproved. That was fine because there was shit Lee did that Barney disapproved of, too.

Owen was sleeping again when he finally got back and maybe everything was where it should’ve been, there was nothing _really_ out of place, but he knew every single goddamn thing in the entire apartment had been picked up and moved and handled and examined. Owen had probably spent the whole day and a half that Lee had been MIA away going through every damn crevice of the place to see what he could find out, if there was anything that’d give him a clue about who in the blue hell Lee Christmas was and if he could trust him, if he knew anything about his life. Fortunately, there was nothing there. He’d burned everything he’d had left that could’ve connected him to the Shaw brothers before he’d left Europe for the States. He’d made himself a sergeant in the SAS instead of a major. He’d claimed to be from Essex instead of Surrey and his faked birth certificate said he was three years older than he actually was. He’d made himself a new identity and the only one in the world who knew it was Barney Ross, because he’d helped him do it. 

He could’ve had something with Barney, he thought, idly, as he toed off his boots and hung his coat by the door. There was something there between Barney and Lee and maybe once things had ended with Lacy he should’ve given it a go. Might’ve been good for them both or it might’ve been an unmitigated bloody shambles because who knew if either of them were really cut out for sharing a place with anyone, let alone each other, waking up together every morning, all that relationship wank that Deckard had only ever really managed to keep up for cover on a long game of an op. But he’d been working himself up to it for months, maybe years, and Barney would’ve been good for Lee. They’d’ve been good for each other. The cheeky cunt was his best friend in the world, after all. Barney Ross was the best friend he’d ever had.

And then Owen’d been thrown out of a fucking plane and Deckard had felt and _still_ felt more or less like he’d been thrown out of it with him. 

He stripped down to his boxers and went to sleep on the sofa trying not to think about the things he’d done for his brother. He’d made a list once, in his head, but revisited it only now and then. He’d been trying to move on without really putting any effort in; Lee Christmas didn’t have a brother.

Sometimes he wondered where the line was and if he’d cross it for Owen. In his brighter moments, he knew there was no line at all where Owen was concerned.

\---

“Teach me to throw a knife,” Owen said in the morning. 

And so, because that made Deckard feel less of a twat than striking up another elliptical conversation he couldn’t get out of except by deserting his own living space like a prize pillock, he did just that. They spent all morning at it, on and off, Deckard demonstrating how to hold the knives, how to handle them, the inhale while drawing it back, the exhale on each release. He had to get in close to correct his posture and Owen let him touch him without argument, without a flinch, without so much as a murmur about it, and Deckard fucking _hated_ that he’d agreed to it, standing there with one hand at Owen’s waist, one hand around his wrist to demonstrate the correct action. But Owen got better at it quickly; turned out his aim wasn’t bad, it was just his technique that variously sucked and blew. 

“So, you have a party trick?” Owen said as they sat down to a lacklustre lunch of microwaved ready meals and crap three-day-old bread. Deckard didn’t ask what he meant, just glanced the question at him. “Do you pop balloons, take apples off people’s heads… party trick. You understand the concept of a _party_ , Lee?”

“I don’t get out much,” Deckard said. “No, for fuck’s sake, I don’t have a party trick.” 

“But could you?”

“Could I _what_?”

Owen lifted a slightly wisened apple from the fruit bowl that sat between them on the dining table and dangled it from the stalk with his fingertips. Apparently that was what passed for a reply and he supposed at least he got the gist. 

Deckard sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I could. Don’t get any ideas, I’m not going to.” 

“And with a gun?”

“Yeah, and with a gun.” 

Owen put down the apple. “You didn’t ask what kind of gun I meant.” 

He shook his head. “I didn’t need to ask.”

Owen smiled, amused. “Cocky,” he said. “And are you good with your hands, too?”

Deckard narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, some might say.”

“Am I?”

“Usually.” Dominic fucking Toretto excluded, but they’d both had that problem. “Maybe not now. You were in a coma, remember. And I’ve seen the x-rays.”

“I made a miraculous recovery.” Owen put down his knife and fork. “Do you think I’m still in danger?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

“Then perhaps you ought to start training me,” Owen said, and sat back in his seat with a self-satisfied smile. Deckard could see he’d just been walked straight into a trap. Owen had always been the Shaw family Oxford-educated, posh-accented smartarse and there really wasn’t a way to tell him he was wrong because he wasn’t. Maybe someone would come for him. Maybe it’d be the DSS or maybe it’d be someone else but it’d all be easier if they were both prepared for the worst.

There wasn’t space in the apartment so they went down to the gym after lunch, once Deckard had dug out a pair of shorts from the back of his closet that had a drawstring round the waist and wouldn’t just slip right off Owen’s slim hips, at least slimmer than Deckard’s. It was a proper place, the kind without the poncey mirrors or the rows of high-tech treadmills, just a boxing ring and weights and bags and various sections covered in mats, one of which they walked over to while a couple of guys dicked about doing some shoddy-arse MMA nearby. They’d asked him to fight them once, he remembered. He’d put on his gloves and beaten them both down in two minutes, and it only took that long because he’d let them think they had a chance in the start. He hadn’t had a _good_ fight since Hobbs. Toretto didn’t fucking count.

They stretched. If they’d had one thing drummed into them back at Sandhurst it’d been _do your bloody warm-ups, soldier_ , so they did, Owen still favouring his right hip and Deckard knew it was the crap with the plane back on the other side of the Atlantic but he also knew there was a scar there under the borrowed shorts from that time back in Israel. Not that he could tell him that he’d been the one who’d sewn it up, his fingers all slick with blood.

It wasn’t much of a contest. Owen had rebuilt some of the muscle mass he’d lost while he’d been stuck in a coma and then stuck in a bed in a hospital ward once he’d finally gone into some pretty intensive physio, but he’d still got a vaguely fucked up hip and that was easy to take advantage of. Six seconds and he’d dumped him down on his arse on the mat. 

“Well, that’s embarrassing,” Owen said, looking thoroughly amused by the whole thing, and reached up his hand; Deckard took it and hauled him back up to his feet. “I’d say I remember being better, but that’s not exactly true.”

“Yeah, well, you were in a coma, you twat,” Deckard said, with a faintly exasperated shake of his head that just made Owen look even more amused. And then they did it again. And again. And _again_ , until Owen was sweating into his borrowed clothes and Deckard was moderately convinced it’d been a bad idea to bring him there. He hadn’t wanted to go. And maybe he hadn’t wanted to hand him his arse, either, but it’d happened nonetheless. He sighed.

“How about you bear in your thick head you’re two inches taller than me and have a couple of inches more reach on you?” Deckard said, stepping in close to demonstrate the height difference with a wave of one gloved hand up by their heads and he meant to step right back but for a second he was caught there by the way Owen was looking at him, couldn’t’ve moved if he’d been ordered to. Not that he’d really taken orders in years or felt inclined to in his life again. He frowned because for a second it was like Owen knew, like Owen remembered and remembered _everything_ , but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Apparently, the moment passed. 

But something must’ve clicked in that gigantic, amnesiac brain of his because the next thing he knew, Owen was all over him like a fucking bar fight on a Saturday night except there was a kind of grim logic to it when Owen’s elbow hit Deckard’s jaw and sent him staggering a few feet backwards. Owen’s eyes were hot and fuck, nothing got Deckard’s blood up like a good fight. He should’ve walked away. He stood his ground.

“Something just occur to you?” Deckard asked, and he knew he sounded slightly testy. 

Owen positively fucking grinned. “Yes,” he said. “It just struck me that I’m not actually a ten stone weakling with a glass jaw.” He shifted slowly, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, lean with muscle even after the unscheduled stay in some bastard London infirmary. And that was the first indication Deckard had had that Owen had the first idea of who and what he really was. It was fucking dreadful and fucking joyous to see him being him. “I think I just remembered that I know how to fight.”

It still wasn’t a fair match. It had never really been a fair match between them because Deckard was stronger and bulkier and still somehow quicker with it, he’d had years more training, years more _specialist_ training and then years more experience on top of that. Owen knew his way around a fight but he was an engineer and a driver and a strategist first, not whatever Deckard was or had been, and he’d only been out of the coma for something like four months of physio and water therapy and all that bollocks. But it was still a fight after that, their hands in pairs of MMA gloves that Deckard had shoved into his kit bag just in case but that didn’t make it feel any better when Owen’s fist connected with his shoulder because, well, they could just hit harder thanks to the padding. And Deckard struck back, caught Owen’s jaw and sent him stumbling, doubled him over then lifted a knee into his chest. He went down, heavily, right on his crappy hip, with an expansive wince. 

Deckard’s pulse was quickening with it and he felt like telling him to suck it up, get up off the floor, get back into it, but he held out a hand because that was what Lee would do, sporting, fair play and jolly fucking hockey sticks and all that. And Owen took his hand and he pulled him down maybe just to spite him because it sure as hell wasn’t to win; Deckard went down hard on top of him, one knee digging into Owen’s thigh, his forearm barred across one of Owen’s shoulders to keep them from ending up in an unintentional Glasgow kiss. They were both breathing too hard, both clearly uncomfortable, both too damn close together for comfort as Deckard shifted to press his hands to the mats instead of Owen’s shoulders and fuck, suddenly it was another time and another place and everything he’d ever done wrong in his whole bollocking arsehole of a life right there in that instant as Owen looked up at him, angry and dark and amused. 

Owen’s lips parted just a fraction and caught Deckard’s eye and for a second he nearly did it, screw the location, screw the twenty other blokes around the room, screw everything because he hadn’t seen Owen in the flesh - at least not while conscious - since that month after Israel. Seven years, nearly eight. No face-to-face contact. For their own good, he’d said at the time, like that meant a damn thing. Owen’s face was flushed from the fight and maybe something else but shit, no, _no_. Deckard flinched bodily, went up on his knees, got up on his feet like he’d been slapped and eventually, once he was steady, he held out his hand. 

“You pull me down again and you’ll be out of my place on your ear, sunshine,” he said, forcing up an iota of a smile. And Owen let him pull him up to his feet. He didn’t smile. Deckard could see the cogs turning as he tried to work out exactly what was going on. Owen knew he was missing something.

They worked a bag or two after that, lifted a few weights for a few minutes but Owen kept looking at him while they did it, not quite surreptitious about it. He’d seen what Deckard had nearly done, he had to have. 

He was already fucking things up in spectacular style and it hadn’t even been a week.

\---

Two days later, after more fighting, more knife-throwing, more tense and terse conversations at the dining table with Deckard trying hard not to get backed into too many more corners, Barney called and Deckard got himself talked into going out with the lads. He took Owen along. Maybe that hadn’t been the best idea. 

He sat there nursing a crappy watery beer watching Owen expertly pump the entire team for information with a charming smile and a weird air of camaraderie and he knew he should’ve stopped it but he supposed at least if he was asking the fellas then he wasn’t asking _him_. He was sick of the damn questions. Besides, the only one of them who knew anything about him that wasn’t a bestselling work of fiction was Barney, and Barney would’ve stuck a knife in his own gut and twisted before giving him up. All they could say was ex-SAS, parents dead, no siblings, handy with a knife; all they could say about the trip to Sweden to pick up Owen was Lee had dropped everything one day and fucked off to England like someone had lit a fire under his arse, but the reasons why were all pure speculation. 

“I’m pretty sure you must’ve been his CO,” Gunner said at one point, the lot of them all having the conversation like Deckard wasn’t even there. 

“Yeah, rumour has it you were a major,” Thorn chimed in. “Christmas was what, a sergeant? I bet you got to boss him around and shit _all_ the time.”

Owen shot him a sharp, questioning look and Deckard mock-saluted, even used the wrong hand for effect and Barney slapped him around the back of the head and Caesar spat his tequila all over the table. That was more or less the time they decided they’d had enough to drink and started to make their way out of the bar in dribs and drabs, some hailing taxis, some walking. Deckard had his bike there and three quarters of a beer wasn’t even close to an issue so they got on, Owen’s hands at his waist hot like that time he’d caught a scorching bullet casing across his chest. He still had the scar. He had a shitload of scars. They both had, some from each other.

A short bike ride later, Deckard let Owen into the apartment and flicked on the lights. Owen turned quickly once they were both inside and pushed him back against the door; he could’ve stopped it, he supposed, but he was too fucking tired to bother. 

“I don’t think you were my CO,” Owen said. 

“Yeah, you weren’t.”

Owen leaned closer, pushing uncomfortably on his shoulders. “Then what was I to you?” he asked. “How do I know you?”

“It’s complicated,” Deckard said, because it was, but Owen laughed, shook his head, the whole thing faintly bitter. 

“So, I was your lover and you’ve decided to nance around it so I don’t think you’re forcing yourself on me,” he said. “That’s noble, Lee, but I’m not a teenage girl. If you know me, you know you’re not going to hurt my precious feelings.”

And he looked so serious about it that all Deckard could do was lean his head back against the door and laugh at him under his breath because _fuck_ , that wasn’t it. Not really. Not the way Owen apparently thought it was.

“Am I wrong?” Owen asked. 

Deckard was still smiling wryly then, at least until one of Owen’s hands went down and squeezed at the crotch of his jeans. His smile sodded off fairly quickly after that and Owen was too damn close, smelling like beer and Deckard’s shitty shower gel and Deckard’s cheap washing powder while wearing Deckard’s clothes and goddamnit, he snapped his head forward, caught him off guard with his forehead smacking right against his and Owen stepped back. He touched his fingers to the space over his eyebrow where he’d just been unceremoniously headbutted, the surprise on his face absolutely priceless. It was worth it for that effect alone, not that he was thinking that at the time. Not that he was thinking at all. Some things in life were just muscle memory.

It could’ve ended there but it didn’t. Deckard strode straight in and he hit him, faked with his left and then jabbed with his right and then goddamnit, it was a fight, again, like all the fights they’d had before, after school behind the bike sheds, on Mrs Enfield’s overgrown allotment, one time in Pakistan or that day in southern Iraq while he’d been roped in to teach self-defence, when they ought to have known better where they’d ended up bruised and pissed off or something else. Owen opened his knuckles on Deckard’s teeth and Deckard got his knee into Owen’s belly, brought his elbow down between his shoulder blades and took him straight down to the ground. Owen turned, flopped onto his back on the scuffed hardwood floor of Deckard’s living room, his nose bloodied but probably not broken, running like a tap over his mouth and his chin and down his neck into the collar of his borrowed shirt. Owen’s fist had split Deckard’s lip against one canine and he knew his teeth were red with a sheen of blood as he smiled darkly. 

“That wasn’t a no,” Owen said, his eyes on him. His cheek was swelling up. _Deckard_ had done that to him and it wasn’t the first time. It wasn’t the first time Owen’d bruised him, either. It was a long and storied history.

Deckard spat blood on the floor and he turned away. He walked away. He locked the bathroom door behind him, shoved a chair up under the handle and he ran the shower and he stripped off his clothes and fuck. He ended up sitting down heavily on the toilet lid with his head in his hands, bleeding into his palms. 

Owen was right. It _wasn’t_ a no. 

\---

He left in the night. 

He wrote a note and left it stuck to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of an AK-47 he’d got from some shitty gun magazine, pinned there like some disgusting Dear John, and he fucked off to the airport. He’d be gone for a day, maybe two, he said. There was food in the fridge and cash in a box in the freezer as if he didn’t know that already from his imperfectly-disguised snooping and if he knew what was good for him he’d stay there and not go gallivanting off to Monaco just because that was the only thing anyone’d told him about his recent past. They’d be looking for him there. He didn’t need to get himself shot and arrested on top of getting himself thrown out of a plane because next time Lee Christmas might not be there to save his arrogant arse from jail.

Of course, Lee Christmas hadn’t really been the one who’d saved him, but no one needed to know that.

He boarded the plane and he left in the night and his lip hurt and his knuckles ached and it was all his fault in that woe is me, boo fucking hoo kind of way where he was angry with himself at least 50% more than he was mired in useless self-pity. He got where he was going because he had a job to do and fuck Barney’s good advice on the matter, and every second he was in Florida he was pissed the fuck off. It was there in him while he was at the airport, there in his hire car, in his storage locker, in the boat somewhere past dawn. It was there when the job was in progress, too, though he pushed it down and pushed it back and got it done in spite of the fact it was all his fault or maybe because of it. It was there when he boarded the flight home. And all the time it went deeper and it went further back until he was back in his twenties and not his forties and he was on his way home from an op.

Even at the start it’d all been his fault. He was flying back home while he was thinking about how he’d flown back home that time from somewhere overseas, who the fuck even remembered where, and he’d gone up to Oxford to visit his brother, spur of the bloody moment like that had ever done anyone any good in the history of anything, and all because he’d gone and missed Owen’s twentieth while he’d been away. He’d knocked on the door of Owen’s room in his smart college digs, been told _fuck’s sake piss off, Darren!_ like Owen had had any clue at all who was knocking, and so he’d picked the lock because that was what he did when there was an obstacle: he just removed it. Served him bloody well right in hindsight, he supposed, when he swung the door open and there was Owen on his knees on his bed, facing the wall, working his own fingers up into his arse. At least that’d solved the mystery of why he hadn’t wanted to be disturbed. 

“If you’re going to let yourself into my bloody room when I’ve said no then the least you could do is shut the door behind you,” Owen said. Deckard closed the door with a sharp clack. “Better.” Owen then proceeded to ease his fingers back out and then went back down on his hands and knees, legs spread wide, showing off absolutely everything he’d got. “Look, do you need an invitation?”

It was fucking obscene and fucking perverse but Deckard had almost wanted to do it. It was monumentally stupid to think Owen wouldn’t’ve noticed in three seconds flat that it wasn’t whoever the fuck Darren was but in the back of his head Deckard was already seeing himself pushing down his jeans, slicking his cock, pushing up against Owen’s arse, pushing _into_ him, his hips in his hands. He could probably have done that much before Owen noticed, at least. The consequences would’ve been something.

What he actually did was clear his throat and so Owen turned and yeah, Owen had never been shy and not exactly backwards in coming forwards, but Deckard had expected more of a reaction than just his brows inching up and a faintly amused, “Oh, it’s you. When did you get back?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Deckard said, dropping his duffel to the floor with a thunk. “So who the fuck is Darren?”

Owen stood and turned to him, totally unhurried, his cock still hard in front of him and he gave the head of it a quick squeeze against his palm. 

“An acquaintance,” Owen replied. “Not that it’s any of your fucking business.” He tilted his head. “Jealous?”

“Would you stop fucking doing that?” Deckard said, which wasn’t a response to the question at all and he supposed that was the point. 

Owen raised his brows and gave his cock a stroke. “What, this?” he said. “Look, you’re the one who broke into my room. I didn’t exactly invite you in.”

“You fucking _definitely_ invited me to do something else, though,” Deckard muttered. 

Owen snorted. “I can get back down on my knees if you like,” he said. “There’s lube on the dresser. Just lock the door first, Dec, we wouldn’t want any innocent passersby to get an eyeful.”

Deckard scowled. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Owen’s eyes narrowed. “Or what?”

He didn’t have an answer, at least not much of one, especially when he was getting a stiffy of his own and it wasn’t like he was going to take him up on his not-quite-offer. So what he did was leave; he walked out and suffered the strange looks from the bookish Oxbridge types as he exited and went out into the streets with his duffel pulled up over his shoulder and his jumper in front of his crotch. He knew he should’ve left, found a hostel or a convenient park or chatted up a girl in a pub and found a room for the night that way before he could get on the first train out of Oxford in the morning, but that just didn’t happen. He was back in the room forty minutes later with a pretty blonde streetwalker in tow. It somehow seemed like a good idea to sic her on Owen once they were in there and the door was locked, hissing something about how their dear departed dad would’ve been fucking appalled to have a gay son and to go on, look sharp, _prove you’re not_. Like it mattered and like their dad had ever been _dear_.

“If you insist,” Owen said, and then he stripped the girl down and he undressed himself again and Deckard, like a bloody fool, took a seat across the room, just to be sure. Owen was watching him while he rolled on the condom. Owen was watching him as he pushed the girl down on her hands and knees there on the bed. Owen was watching him as he pushed inside her and Deckard could feel his face flushing like his damn cheeks were on fire as Owen fucked the pretty blonde girl with the name he couldn’t remember and probably wasn’t hers anyway, each slap of skin on skin like a clap of fucking thunder. Deckard’s eyes were _not_ on her. He was watching Owen watch him, still watching when Owen’s hips bucked shallowly then sharply, erratically. He watched as Owen came, their eyes on each other, Deckard’s hands gripping white-knuckled at the chair arms, his cock straining against his jeans. If Owen had asked him to fuck him right then and there, he would’ve done it, no hesitation, _no_ hesitation. He’d’ve been inside him in seconds whether the girl stayed or not, baby brother or not, shoved in balls deep and desperate. Fucking hell, he’d miscalculated. 

What had actually happened then was that Deckard paid the girl as coolly he could as she pulled on her clothes and she left with a smile and a wink. What actually happened was Owen tied off the condom and threw it into the bin with the remnants of the night’s chicken madras. What actually happened was Owen came closer, still stark bollock naked, his expression and his body language somewhere between hysterical and fucking furious. Owen pushed him back against the door and he kissed him, hard, teeth and tongue and ire, shoved his hand really fucking uncomfortably down the front of Deckard’s jeans, and he brought him off right there in short, sharp jerks. 

“Now will you piss off out of my sex life and leave me alone?” Owen said, wiping off his hand on the front of Deckard’s jeans. 

So he did. He picked up his bag and he walked out the door and he didn’t go back there again, not even once. He left the gift he’d brought him, a reading book that wasn’t really meant for reading.

Once he’d quietly broken Darren’s neck and dropped him neatly off a bridge into the Thames, he started sending postcards instead. It had made sense at the time.

\---

Owen hadn’t left the apartment when he got back, and he wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed or so sick of it all that he was just mutely indifferent. 

He was on the treadmill when he got in, wearing a running vest Deckard hadn’t even known he owned, but then he saw the bags and boxes that were currently adorning his sofa and his credit card sitting conspicuously on the coffee table by his laptop and suddenly it made sense. He supposed he deserved that, considering the bruises he saw there spread across Owen’s cheek and jaw when he stopped running and turned to face him. 

“Been having fun?” Deckard said. 

“Some,” Owen replied, tersely, and then he pissed off into the shower. He supposed he deserved that, too.

Barney called and saved him from a fate worse than stony silence as they ate some kind of odd quiche that Owen had ordered in from an over-fancy local deli. Deckard had to remind himself that transferring cash into his no doubt waning bank account from his slightly shadier sources would just pique Owen’s curiosity. _More_ curiosity wasn’t exactly what he needed.

“A job’s come up,” Barney said. “What do you say, Christmas? Recon only. Usual cut.”

“Yeah, Barn, I’d love to, but I’ve got this bastard house guest…”

“Bring him along.”

Deckard frowned. “You sure about that?”

“Are you saying he can’t handle it?”

“Course he can. He was SAS, not some jumped-up weekend warrior with a paintball fetish.” 

Barney snorted; they’d seen a few of those over the years and it’d never worked out well, usually ended with vomiting and overpriced psychotherapy. “So bring him along. Take-off at nineteen-hundred.”

“Cheers, Barn. Owe you one.”

Barney chuckled. “Don’t thank me yet. His cut’s coming out of yours.”

Barney hung up and Deckard shook his head as he pocketed his phone. Owen was looking at him questioningly over the crap quiche; Deckard went forward on the table on his elbows. 

“We’ve got a job,” he said. “We’d best get you some gear.”

They pulled into the hangar in Deckard’s banged-up Jeep that evening, kit bags at the ready. Apparently the rest of the lads had been primed to expect a newbie because no one said a damn word about it when Deckard and Owen boarded, even if a couple of them eyed him like they’d no earthly clue why they needed _yet another_ Expendable. Not that Owen was in the team. Deckard wondered if that would be an even half-decent idea or just a disaster waiting in the wings. 

And okay, to Barney’s credit, the job really was as easy as he’d said it was, for once out of all the jobs they’d ever taken. It needed a tonne of them on the ground at once due to the sprawl of the complex and the time-sensitive nature of the job, but there was not a single shot fired that wasn’t just with a digital camera and three hours after they’d landed they were back in the air again, the fellas all nodding off in the back while Deckard slouched in the co-pilot’s chair next to Barney. 

“I know we’ve already got our token Brit,” Deckard said, fiddling with the knife belt that he’d come surprisingly close to leaving on the living room table. “But what do you think, Barn? Can we bring him along next time?”

Barney glanced away from the instruments for a second, fiddling with his fucking atrocity of a lucky ring. “You sure you wanna go down that route?” he asked, as he looked back out of the window and into the clouds. “You gonna vouch for him?” 

He wasn’t sure. He was half convinced he should just set him up with a new identity and send him as far away as he could - he was thinking Berlin or Milan or maybe Moscow but New York would’ve done in a pinch - because it wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it and it wasn’t like he thought Owen would go under without him, even with a huge black hole where his memory had been. Maybe he could’ve hooked him up with a couple of contacts, too, because he did still have them, people who owed debts he still needed to collect, and he was sure Owen would’ve been back to his old tricks in a jiffy. 

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said instead. 

And maybe Barney looked skeptical, but that was probably just because he remembered the shit they’d had to go through to get Deckard out of jail. They both knew how he’d ended up there.

\---

When they stopped to refuel in San Juan, Deckard hopped out and told them he’d make his own way back. He threw Owen his keys and he left, abruptly, just like that. 

He’d been rotting in that shitty DSS off-the-books jail for three months by the time Barney and the lads had found him, and he’d resented every minute of it with visions of Doc after they’d sprung him from years-long captivity all jumping about in his head. He strongly suspected that another couple of months and he could’ve found a way out himself - it wasn’t like he hadn’t done it before, after all - but it was a relief to see Barney’s ugly mug when the shooting stopped and the door opened and not Hobbs’s, definitely not Dominic fucking Toretto’s. 

“Thought you’d never get here,” Deckard said, going up to his feet in his prison-issue jumpsuit. “What took you so long?”

“If I’d known you were going to be an ungrateful jackass about it, I’d’ve hung on longer,” Barney said, flashing him a smile as he handed him a gun. It’d been a good rescue, he had to give the fellas that.

Deckard had never exactly been a huge fan of wetsuits and snorkels but they served a certain purpose. He came up on a private beach sometime around 2am, retrieving a weapon complete with silencer from inside his suit. He went room to room and was back in the Caribbean before anyone even knew he was there, on a boat skipping over the waves back to Puerto Rico. It’d been surprisingly easy. He’d been planning it for a while.

When he knocked on his apartment door, he half expected Owen to have pissed off overseas and he was starting to wonder if the building manager was going to be around to let him in when the lock clicked and the door finally swung open. Owen let him in. 

“You thought I was going to leave, didn’t you,” Owen said, locking the door behind them as Deckard dropped his bag and then went down to a crouch to unlace his boots. He glanced up for a second, up at Owen who was loitering by the locked door with his arms crossed over his chest. He’d been online shopping again, by the looks of it; the jeans fit him too well to have been Deckard’s and the jumper he’d got pushed up to his elbows probably cost more than they’d just made on their recent job. He was doing it to piss him off and get a rise out of him, he knew that, so he didn’t say a word about it. 

“Thought had crossed my mind, yeah,” he said. “I’m not stopping you. You can fuck off to Monaco and see where that gets you if you’re that sick of the sight of me.” 

Deckard stood. Owen looked at him so he looked back at him, hands on hips, the kind of low-level pissed off that had always been usual for time spent around his younger brother. 

“I think I’ll stay,” Owen said, and smiled without meaning a fraction of it. “I’m expecting a few more deliveries.”

_A few more_ turned out to be _a lot more_ and in the lull between jobs, Deckard found himself playing porter to a shitload of new crap that he didn’t doubt had all been ordered on his credit cards. There was practically a whole new wardrobe got marched in through his apartment door and he wrestled with a new sodding sofa all the way up the stairs with an unsuspecting delivery bloke who looked so red in the face he might’ve collapsed of a massive coronary at any second. There was a bloody gallimaufry of kitchen implements, expensive German knives, and Deckard blithely signed for them at the door each and every time while Owen watched him with something close to a smirk. 

“You could just cancel the damn card,” Barney told him, night five, sitting in the bar, both of them nursing scotches that Deckard didn’t feel like drinking. 

“That’s like admitting defeat,” he replied, and Barney just shook his head sadly. 

“You two stubborn Limey asses deserve each other,” Barney said. Deckard couldn’t say he disagreed. Besides, the new sofa had turned out to be a hell of a lot more comfortable than the old one.

They were dancing around each other there in Deckard’s one-bed apartment all the damn time after that, living in each other’s pockets with all of Owen’s shampoo and shaving gel and deodorant that’d probably cost more than Deckard’s did for a year all laid out on the bathroom counter, food Deckard hated in the fridge, mp3s of music he fucking detested turning up on his laptop. Owen kept looking at him over the top of a glossy car magazine that he’d apparently subscribed to in Lee Christmas’s name, stepping too close around him in doorways, lifting weights while Deckard was on the treadmill, on the treadmill while Deckard was lifting weights. He was doing it on purpose, getting up his nose and in his space like he’d done that time on the op in Pakistan, not that Owen remembered it. 

It was back when they’d both been in favour, when Owen’d just taken over the Mobility Division and Deckard was the go-to guy for wetwork. The first thing either of them had known about being assigned together was turning up on the base near Kandahar and while Deckard hauled his arse out of one transport, Owen was exiting another. They looked at each other and even fifty metres, dusk and a fortnight’s worth of stubble over Deckard’s head and jaw apparently hadn’t fooled Owen about who he was looking at. He’d given him a mock-salute - Owen was still a captain then, hadn’t had his last promotion - and Deckard walked over. 

“Major,” Owen said. 

“Captain,” Deckard replied. 

They eyed each other without another word till their confused escort showed them to the makeshift canvas barracks. Maybe they should’ve had separate rooms, might’ve if they’d’ve been back in England, but it was a minor miracle they’d got as much privacy as they had, just the two of them in a crap semi-permanent tent, and they spent three godforsaken weeks there, getting dusty and hot and pissed off at each other while they went about the op, Owen’s team all looking at them like they’d lost it half the time. They’d been too close because Owen kept pushing and Deckard wouldn’t admit defeat, around each other too damn long, sleeping in the same room, washing in the same crappy shower block while they tried to avoid each other and then there Owen was one morning when he woke up, too early, with a cutthroat razor in one hand and shaving gel in the other. Deckard let him shave his head because the hair growing in was getting to him. Deckard let him shave his face, the too-sharp edge of the razor brushing against his throat and Owen’s hands at his jaw, and he told himself it was just because he hated straight razors. Deckard let him shave his chest after that, not like he was a fan of it but in the moment he couldn’t think of a reason not to. Then Owen’s hands moved down to the waist of Deckard’s boxers and he stopped him then, finally, at last, and caught his wrist. 

“Don’t,” he said. But he was ridiculously hard and it wasn’t like his boxer shorts were hiding that particular fact. 

So Owen put down the razor by the bed and he went down on him instead, pulled his boxers over his hips and sucked him till he came. Fuck knew how that was the sensible compromise. And the op had been completed that same afternoon and Deckard had taken off before he could get ambushed like that again. He’d sent him a postcard from sunny Dubai three days later, Marseille a week after that. 

They were dancing around each other in Deckard’s apartment for weeks after that, between jobs. They worked pretty steadily, Barney calling them up and sending them out on the small stuff with Smilee or Thorn or Mars, Owen taking care of the transportation on the ground because fuck, as much as Deckard knew his way around a car, once upon a time it’d been Owen’s entire job and after the first couple of times out it was like he’d never stopped. When they got back in, Owen worked on the plane for a while, tinkering, getting his hands dirty with Barney while Deckard sat with the lads in the hangar and sharpened his knives and cleaned his guns. Apparently the toffee-nosed engineering degree had come in handy for something, at least, even if it was as a glorified mechanic. Then they went home together, always on the edge of a fight.

Deckard knew what the fellas were thinking without them saying a word because it was plastered all over their faces: Lee was sleeping with the sarcastic British twat who was shit hot with cars. He wasn’t, as it happened, though running into Owen coming out of the shower with a towel around his waist or catching him changing when he went to the closet for clean underwear or walking into the bedroom in the morning to find him with his dick in hand in his bed was just about sending him round the bloody bend. It was like Owen was trying to press the point about how he thought maybe they’d been lovers, though it wasn’t even like there’d been a single thing in the apartment that’d belonged to him so really all he had to go on was how they acted around each other. He should’ve kicked him out but he’d never been good with doing what he _should_ do.

Owen drove a tank in a former Soviet nation while Smilee and Thorn whipped around on dirt bikes and all Deckard could do was stand back and shake his head at them all. The bastard fit right in. And so Deckard made plans because what the hell else was he going to do, and the way Barney looked at him sometimes as weeks turned to a month turned to two and they were _still_ dancing around each other, it was like he knew. Barney always knew. He should’ve taken up a second career as a bloody psychic.

“Barn, we’ve gotta talk,” he told him, as he settled down on a stool there at the bar one night. 

“We’ve got a job,” Barney said. “For Drummer, three days’ time. Take-off 6am Wednesday.” He raised his brows. “Can you remember that or do I need to write it down?” Deckard picked up his newly-arrived beer and gave him a quick half-arsed salute with it instead of a reply. “We’ll talk after.” And he knew that was meant to give him time to change his mind. 

He nodded. “Yeah, after,” he said. But he wasn’t planning on coming back. Barney knew that, too.

\---

“I’ll be back before wheels-up,” Deckard told Owen, as he was tying his bootlaces. 

“Should I ask where you’re going?”

He shot Owen a look, watching him cross the room for a second, then turned back to his laces with more concentration than they usually required.

“A job?” Owen asked, pressing though his tone was carefully casual. “Maybe I should ask your friend Barney about these mysterious disappearances.” 

Deckard double-knotted his laces and came back up to his feet. “More like a personal project than a job,” he replied. “Last one, then I’m done.”

“You realise that doesn’t make it seem any less mysterious, don’t you?”

Deckard gave a short snort of amusement. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” 

“I noticed,” Owen said, crossing his arms. He leaned against the wall; Deckard knew he was being watched as he turned for his coat. “I think you should take me with you.”

He turned back. “I should?”

“Yes, you should.”

It didn’t seem like much of a reason and he should’ve told him no but frankly, over the years, he should’ve told him no so many times he’d lost count. 

“You’ve got three minutes to pack,” he told him instead. Four minutes later, they were out the door in the suits they’d worn to get out of Europe. 

He didn’t tell him where they were going and Owen didn’t ask; he let the plane tickets they bought at the desk in the airport tell him instead: round trip to Denver, though a quick change of passports through a car window outside the airport out there in Colorado saw them back in the terminal and heading out to LA. Rental car out to a storage locker, switch to a truck sitting there waiting in said locker, out to the suburbs in the bright California sun. They ate in a shitty little diner and Owen didn’t ask what they were doing there in Los Angeles. He let Sergeant Lee Christmas tell him about Major Owen Shaw’s unceremonious ejection from the British military instead, about an arms shipment that had mysterious gone astray, but no one had realised how far the whole thing had gone until Owen Shaw was gone like a puff of smoke. Drug cartels overthrown and brought under his control, missiles, overpriced motor vehicles, all that shit, Owen had been into it. 

“You’re the definition of _criminal mastermind_ , Shaw,” Deckard told him. “There’s a picture of you in the Oxford English Dictionary, I bloody swear.”

Owen chuckled, but what he said was, “I don’t remember.” He polished off his coffee. “But it sounds right.”

After dark, Deckard pulled the case from the boot of the car and he assembled the rifle and Owen watched him do it. He gave Owen a scope to spot for him and he knew how to do it, like an instinct because he couldn’t remember times or places or people or events for shit but his skills hadn’t evaporated along with them. Deckard squeezed the trigger; the target went down heavily on the pavement, dead weight, and they left, dumped the car, walked back to the storage locker, picked up the hire car. Deckard gave Owen the keys and got into the passenger side. Now it was finished, he didn’t feel much like driving. 

“What was his name?” Owen asked as he drove. “Did you know?”

“I knew,” he said, closing his eyes. He sighed out a long breath. “Dominic Toretto.”

The hotel wasn’t far and Owen pulled into its underground parking garage; they went up to the front desk, bags in hand, checked in under names that neither of them had used before that and probably wouldn’t after. Deckard was dimly aware that Owen was looking at him as they went upstairs in the elevator. He was dimly aware that Owen was walking too close behind him down the corridor to his room. Once they were inside, the door locked behind them, he was almost expecting it when Owen shoved him up against the nearest wall. 

“Dominic Toretto,” he said, too close, his hands on him. “I hear he put me in a coma.”

“Dominic Toretto,” Deckard repeated. “He _did_ put you in a coma.”

“You killed him.” Owen shoved his forearm up under Deckard’s chin. “For me?”

Deckard just laughed. The knew there was no fucking way to answer that without another lie, lies on lies on fucking lies and Owen glared and so he shrugged as best he could while trapped against a wall. 

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Who the hell else did you think was gonna do it?”

Owen stepped back sharply. Deckard straightened his cuffs as Owen looked at him. 

“We were lovers,” Owen said. 

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Then we should’ve been.” 

They had separate rooms, next door to each other, a different key in Owen’s hand but he didn’t leave and it didn’t seem like he planned to. He stepped back in, back up close as he dropped the key to the floor; he took the lapels of Deckard’s jacket in his hands and _fuck_ , he should’ve pushed him back, but goddamnit Owen kissed him and the next thing Deckard knew he’d got his hands in Owen’s too-long hair and he was kissing him back, pressed up against him, bloody well lost. They should’ve been lovers, after all the shit they’d done for each other. They should’ve been right from the day he’d gone home and caught Owen wanking over that crap home video he’d forgotten he’d made, of him fucking their dad’s old Navy captain’s fresh-faced lieutenant son. They should’ve been from that night he’d beaten up the bloke whose cock he’d walked in to find Owen sucking and Owen, the little shit, hadn’t stopped jacking himself off right there on his knees while Deckard broke his fingers breaking the cunt’s jaw. They should’ve been since Israel. Maybe, just for once, they could be.

Deckard pushed him but he didn’t push him _away_ ; he pushed him back and Owen clenched his jaw and clenched his fists like he was ready for a fight but Deckard’s hands went to the buttons of his jacket instead and the fight, for once, didn’t happen. It was fucking odd because all they’d ever done was piss each other off and fuck each other up and there they were, hands on each other’s clothes, not calm about it because Deckard’s pulse was racing and he could see Owen’s chest rise and fall a hell of a lot too quickly for _calm_. 

They undressed each other. It wasn’t slow but it wasn’t hurried, either, callused fingers pulling open ties, fiddling with buttons until they stepped apart to pull off their shirts and step out of their shoes, discarding socks. Deckard pushed Owen back till his calves hit the end of the bed and he sat; Deckard brought one shin up onto the bed next to Owen’s hip and leaned in, Owen’s hands at his back, the light rake of his nails over muscle as Deckard kissed him again, long and deep till he was fucking stupid with it and Owen’s fingers were unbuckling his belt. He pulled back to watch him do it, to watch him unzip his fly and drag his well-tailored trousers down over his hips along with his boxers till they were pooled around his ankles so he stepped out of them, naked and hard and bewildered because this was the last bloody thing on earth he should’ve been doing. Maybe it was just the fact that Toretto was dead. Maybe it wasn’t.

Owen stood. He unbuckled his belt and slid off what was left of his expensive suit as Deckard watched him do it and for a moment that was all he did, he just stood there rubbing absently at the trail of hair that led down to his dick that was standing up hard and proud. It wasn’t like they’d never been naked in the same room before but this was some bloody thing else. Especially when Owen finally moved, yanked Deckard in close by his hips and he could feel the pre-come from Owen’s obscene porno erection smear straight across his belly. 

They went down on the bed in a haphazard heap, flushed and darkly amused and thrilled with adrenaline as they shuffled their way up to the pillows. Owen leaned over the side of the bed and rifled through his bag for a second, came back with some hypoallergenic hand lotion crap and Deckard didn’t bother feigning ignorance: he knew what that was for. He knew what Owen _meant_ it for, at least, that was abundantly fucking clear, but what he did instead was pop it open and rub it all over the length of Owen’s cock with hands that were humiliatingly fucking close to shaking, stroked it over him, squeezed the head with his fingertips against his palm and Owen’s hips shifted as his hands went up to the vertical wooden slats in the headboard. Owen held on. Owen watched him, pressing up into Deckard’s hand with his heels braced down hard against the mattress.

“Owen…” Deckard said, the thumb of his free hand tracing that damn scar by Owen’s hip, the one that was pretty damn close to hidden under another one, more recent, from the surgery. You maybe wouldn’t’ve known it was there without knowing where to look for it. 

“Lee,” Owen replied, slightly pointedly. Deckard stopped stroking. 

“My name’s not Lee.”

Owen smiled, bitterly, sarcastically, but there was something else there under it. “I don’t give a toss what your name is,” he said. And so Deckard shifted and he straddled Owen’s thighs; he took a long, deep breath with Owen’s dick in his hand and Jesus Christ, as he watched Owen watch him he pushed down, sat back, got the wide, blunt tip of Owen’s cock up between his cheeks and Owen swore, harshly, as Deckard settled down on the length of him, pushed him right up inside him. It wasn’t like it was the first time Deckard had done it, sometimes his ops had asked for more than a finger on a trigger, but fuck, fucking hell, he was squeezing his own thighs nearly hard enough to bruise, breath unsteady as a fucking asthmatic greyhound as he knelt there with Owen’s cock in him as far as it would go. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Owen hissed, his hands gripping so tight at the slats in the headboard that Deckard was almost surprised they hadn’t snapped. And he flexed his hips and Deckard took a sharp breath with it before he took the hint and he started to move. He rubbed his eyes hard with the heels of his hands as he shifted, the muscles tight right through his thighs as he rose and fell just an inch or so but Jesus, fuck, that was enough. But then it wasn’t enough; he moved more, moved harder, leaned forward his his hands either side of Owen’s chest and then Owen was bucking up into him, straining, his skin flushed right from his cheeks down into his chest. Deckard pulled up, his hands at Owen’s waist, his palms over the taut muscles in his abdomen so fucking defined he could’ve come all over them right then and there if he hadn’t leant back, arched his back, got his hands to his heels like he’d taken up yoga and pumped his fucking hips while he screwed his eyes shut. 

“Would you fucking look at me?” Owen said, and his eyes snapped open because Jesus, that was hot, the way Owen’s eyes were on him as Deckard brought his hand down to his own cock and stroked and it was seconds, _seconds_ until he jerked and squeezed and came all over Owen’s belly in a spasm so hard he felt like he’d pulled every muscle he had. Then Owen’s hands came down to Deckard’s thighs, his hips, held him there as he bucked up into him sharply, three times, four, bloody erratic until he’d finished too, pushed right up inside him as damn far as he could go. Owen was watching him the whole damn time. Deckard had never felt so ashamed or so fucking elated.

He could barely stand after that he’d strained his thighs so hard and Owen wasn’t much better, his lower back apparently stinging like a son of a bitch. So they lay there, side by side once Deckard had eased himself off him, eased Owen out of him, filthy and sweaty and fucking exhausted. 

“Why does it feel like it’s the first time we’ve done that?” Owen asked, as Deckard’s fingertips traced that scar at Owen’s hip. 

“Because it is, you twat,” Deckard said. 

“So how exactly do you know I have a scar there?”

“Because I’m the prat who sewed up the cut,” he said. He moved his hand away, went down flat on his back. “Let me know when you remember.”

But it’d been two and a half months since they’d left London, nearly three. Owen had been awake for four months, maybe five, before that. 

Deckard didn’t have much hope Owen would ever remember, and frankly, it was for the best if he never did.

\---

The job went fairly well, considering. Considering the fact that there were no simple jobs, ever, _ever_ , only the exceptions that proved the rule, and they should all have known that by that point. Deckard sometimes thought maybe they all did know and just went along with it anyway because what the fuck else did they have to do with their lives? But frankly, his previous career as a high-paid international assassin had been at least 70% safer and it had paid better by twice that, three times, ten. 

They ended up somewhere on a tiny island off the coast of South America like those had ever treated them well so far, somewhere in a bloody forest in the middle of a rainstorm so they were all soaked through and ankle-deep in mud within the first five minutes. Mars and Doc got cut off inside running recon, there was a fucking _army_ pouring out of the cartel’s impressive compound all around them and Gunner up in his perch with his rifle and Caesar with his big fucking gun couldn’t keep up. They’d apparently walked into the middle of a drug war since some bloody government’s overdressed and underpowered military was setting up a beach invasion but even if they scrubbed the op, at the very least they couldn’t leave without the rest of the team. Once upon a time Deckard might have, and he wasn’t sure if the change had more to do with a bloody Gordian knot of shifting, evolving loyalties or the fact that he really, really wanted to get his hands around someone’s throat.

It was a moment of idiocy that did it. Deckard was standing there in the pouring rain with Lee’s knives strapped all over his chest and fuck, maybe Lee Christmas was him but he knew he wasn’t Lee Christmas, not all the way through, not all the way down. He had Christmas’s tattoo on his arm but the scars were all Deckard Shaw’s. 

“Why don’t we just knock on the door?” Deckard said. He glanced at Barney to his right; Barney grimaced but lifted his chin in a sort of agreement. He glanced at Owen to his left; Owen’s hand was already on his rifle. “Then let’s get this shit done.”

They went in. They went in hard, in a shitty Jeep that Owen drove like a dyed-in-the-wool madman, just the three of them with the rest of the lads hanging back to lay down cover. They went _through_ the door, which he guessed counted as knocking, seconds behind an exploded grenade, the air choking-hot around them, scorching the Jeep’s already fucked paint job. Barney had his revolver in one hand and an M15 in the other and he didn’t look surprised when Deckard pulled twin SIGs from holsters at his thighs instead of the first of Lee’s knives. 

He’d been in worse situations, not that that was saying much. The three of them shot their way through the compound at a swift clip, Owen at his side, Barney at their back, both of them taking his lead with neither hesitation nor argument. Barney hadn’t recruited him for his wit and charm, after all, though he’d always liked to think they made a fairly handsome bonus, and it’d really only been three days since Owen’d watched him shoot a bloke in cold blood _for him_ so loyalties were hardly in question. His elbow connected with a nose. He stamped in hard on a knee and heard the bones break as the leg bent in the wrong way. A spray of gunfire from Barney’s M15 as Owen reloaded his Glocks, the pop-pop of Owen’s handguns as Barney reloaded his rifle. Some poor bastard got Owen round the neck with one arm and Deckard put a bullet through his skull without so much as a blink. It was just like that day, seven years before, just with added Barney Ross. 

Then there they were, in a sprawling dining room with Doc and Mars and their target all bunched together on heavy, elaborate dining chairs, tied up in a circle. 

“Put down your weapons,” said the nice man in the nice suit with his gun to Doc’s bagged head, the mezzanine around the top of the room outlined in armed guards. “Get down on your knees.” So they did; Deckard nodded and they did it slowly, going down to the tiled floor. And as the nice man in the nice suit relaxed, Deckard whipped a knife through the air and straight into his wrist - he guessed there was more of Lee Christmas in him than he’d realised. The gun dropped; the man screamed; they scooped up their guns and in six seconds flat all those lovely armed guards were on the floor, too.

“What just happened?” Doc asked. “That you, Barney?”

“Yeah, Doc, it’s me,” Barney said, and he pulled the damn bag off Doc’s head. Deckard handed him a knife to Barney who set about the zip ties around Doc’s wrists and ankles then moved on to Mars while Deckard and Owen checked the corpses were all really corpses, putting a round in each head. Maybe it was overkill but he caught Owen watching him and he wouldn’t’ve stopped if he’d been paid.

Deckard radioed out to Caesar, told him to take the fellas and head back to the plane and they’d follow, they’d got Doc and Mars and they might even be getting paid ‘cause they’d laid hands on the target and Barney, right then, pulled the bag off said target’s head, cut through the zip ties, let him pull off his gag. He should’ve known it’d come, their line of work, their clientele, but fuck. Really; fuck. 

“Barney Ross,” said Mr Nobody, as he stood from his chair and dusted down his suit with both hands. He pulled sunglasses from his top jacket pocket like a proper wanker and slipped them on despite the fact they were still indoors. “Drummer sent you?”

“Yeah, something like that,” Barney said. “Look, I don’t mean to cramp your style but we’re running short on time. Could we get your spook ass outta here?”

“By all means,” said the spook, with a wide, gracious half-bow. But then his gaze lit on Owen and he nudged his shades down his nose. “My, my, if it isn’t Owen Shaw.” Owen’s eyes narrowed and Deckard knew he was fucked because the bastard son of a whore turned to him next. If he hadn’t needed to reload, he might’ve shot him then and there. “ _Deckard_ Shaw. Drummer must be getting desperate in his old age.” 

“You’re one to talk, gramps,” Deckard said, before anyone else could say anything else. “Get your arse in gear.” 

And so they left. They trooped out of there with Doc and Mars giving each other a damn weird look as Doc mouthed _Deckard?_ and Barney shot him a glance that told him _let’s get outta here, we’ll sort out this shitstorm later_. He didn’t look at Owen. He couldn’t look at Owen. 

They went back to the plane, through the forest, through the acres of mud. He was covered in blood that wasn’t his. He wondered if Owen remembered.

\---

Israel had been a fucking mess. 

He’d been in Turkey when he’d heard, out on an op. He’d turned on his mobile and he waited for voicemail and there it was, thirty seconds of shit that made his stomach turn as he shoved his nails into his palms so hard he bruised himself. Owen’d been captured by some fucking no-name terrorist organisation that frankly Deckard had never heard of before and never did again after, and that phone call was all he had to go on, a surreptitious pocket dial while the fuckers took his little brother hostage. Thank Christ Owen’d had training ‘cause he got in all the pertinent details, rapid-fire, before the call beeped to an end. They’d found the phone. They’d probably stepped on the phone.

His handlers told him not to go. They _ordered_ him not to go. They told him to stay on target and get the job done and they’d send a team for Owen, they’d follow protocol, but he paced, and he swore, and he put his fist through the crappy wooden coffee table in his on-the-job apartment that was suddenly stifling, claustrophobic, and the next thing he knew he was disobeying orders, on a plane to Tel Aviv. He couldn’t trust anyone but himself with it. He didn’t give a fraction of a fuck what that meant for his future, only that his brother _have_ a future.

He had contacts there because by then he’d had contacts everywhere so he called on them; sixteen hours after he’d received Owen’s voicemail he was scaling the wall of the compound just outside the city after dark. Twenty minutes later, everyone inside was dead and he set the fucking place on fire after, left it burning as he drove away with Owen slumped there in the passenger seat of his purloined Land Rover. They’d beaten him, threatened to kill him, threatened to cut off his fingers or his toes or his tongue and deliver them to the British Embassy bloody FedEx, run the blade of a knife down over his hip till his blood soaked his Army-issue combat trousers and so Deckard had put a blade or a bullet in every last one of them. They’d hurt his brother. No one on this earth got to get away with that.

“I didn’t expect it to be you,” Owen said, hoarsely, as they boarded the plane, his arm around Deckard’s shoulders. 

“Who the fuck else would it be, you nonce?” Deckard said. “Father bloody Christmas?”

Owen chuckled under his breath as Deckard lowered him into a seat there in the beaten-up old cargo plane of one of Deckard’s old contacts, then he passed out again. When he woke somewhere over Turkey, Deckard had stripped him naked chest to thigh to wash out his hip wound with cheap vodka and he watched him do it, gritting his teeth all the while, as he cleaned out his wound and sewed it up, treated it, gauzed it. He was white as a sheet and shaking and fucked and so once his clothes were back in place Deckard shifted around, pulled him back against his chest and kept him warm. There was still blood all over him when they landed, in all the creases around his wrists, under his nails, but that wasn’t exactly new. 

They spent three days in a safe house in Bulgaria just to make sure no one had followed them, to make sure Owen was ready to go back because he faded in and out for the first twenty-four hours, but after that the worst seemed to pass. Fucking concussions. Deckard was on unpleasantly intimate terms with them. So they sat together and they ate crap soup together and dulled things down with booze and Owen never thanked him because they both knew he didn’t have to. It was why Deckard had sent all those goddamn postcards over the years, after all. 

A week later, they’d pulled Deckard back to England for a hearing. A month after that, he was out of the SAS on his ear. A month after _that_ , they sent a spec ops team to kill him and Owen was there with them, sneaked in with them, convinced them it was part of the plan because the sod had never been unconvincing a day in his life. Deckard was fairly sure no one ever knew it was the two of them who killed the team and not just him, fighting back to back. And when the whole team was dead, when they’d cleared the room with a bullet to each head, when the two of them were fucking steeped in blood and they supposed they’d finally committed treason for each other, they’d left together. They went to Deckard’s backup safe house and they took off each other’s bloody clothes. They stepped into the shower and their hands went everywhere, washing away the blood or at least that’s what Deckard had told himself they were doing. But he’d walked Owen back up to the wall in the harsh, flickering white bathroom light and he’d pressed his mouth to his jaw, to his neck, bit there, sucked until there was a mark that’d be there for weeks and Owen’s hands were cupping his arse and they were hard against each other. 

Maybe it was then that it dawned on him that Owen was the last and only person in the world who mattered to him, or maybe it’d been years before, back when their mum had died and their dad disappeared inside a bottle and the fucking Royal Navy. Deckard and then Owen had both joined the Army just to spite him, Deckard right from sixth form and Owen after uni. The day their dad died, they’d officially been all the family each other had left; they’d both known they’d been all each other had since long before that, however fucked up it was. But the problem had never been the fact they were brothers, it was the things they’d do for each other. It was the terrifying lengths they’d go to.

They dried off with towels so roughened from overuse that they could nearly have taken the skin off and they went into the bedroom and it should’ve ended there but it really fucking didn’t. They went to bed naked because all their clothes were so soaked in blood they needed burning and Deckard should’ve known better, did but apparently just didn’t give a toss because Owen pushed him down flat on his back and shifted up on top of him. 

“No prostitute this time?” Owen had said then, with a practically fucking saintly smile. 

“Oh, fuck off,” Deckard had replied, and suddenly Owen’s smile had been substantially less beatific. Apparently he found Deckard’s irritation hilarious.

There’d been no lube in the place, not even bloody hand lotion and neither of them felt like braving the contents of the kitchen and afterwards Deckard thought that was probably a good thing. It had been bad enough that Owen went down on his hands and knees on the grubby mattress, bad enough that Deckard rubbed the head of his cock along the crack of Owen’s arse, all of it bad enough without fucking him too. In the end, he’d pushed him down on his stomach and he’d pushed his cock in between his thighs and Owen’d shifted under him, till he shoved his hand between Owen’s groin and the mattress and let him rub himself against his palm. He’d come between Owen’s thighs, pressed up right behind his balls. Owen wasn’t long after. They’d needed another fucking shower after that but they didn’t bother till the morning. They slept together till dawn.

That was what was in Deckard’s head as they left the plane and they got into his shitty Jeep and Barney gave him a look, that _be careful_ look, that _if he kills you, I’ll kill him_ look and so he nodded tensely in acknowledgement. He should’ve left him in the hospital back in England to stand trial where at least there wasn’t a death penalty and he’d never have known he’d had a brother unless someone told him, let alone half the things they’d done. He should’ve let the team get him out of Israel and not fucked up his own career to do it himself. He should’ve sat him down back at uni and told him _for fuck’s sake, don’t join the army_ and maybe he’d’ve been a decent engineer and had a proper job and earned a proper wage but fuck that, neither of them were built for suburbs and wives and 2.4 kids, golden retrievers and the Wednesday night pub quiz.

Owen didn’t speak the whole way back to the apartment. He didn’t speak as they walked up the stairs under too-bright lights that picked out every bruise in each of their faces. Owen unlocked the door with Deckard’s key and they went inside and turned on the lights and took off their coats and Deckard thought maybe that was it, Owen would pack all his pricey crap into a suitcase and take the next flight out to Europe because _this_ Owen, fucking amnesiac Owen, didn’t know the first thing about himself, let alone his brother. He’d be disgusted with the thought that he’d fucked his brother like everyone else who wasn’t them would be. But he turned and he punched him instead, right across the jaw, and sent him sprawling. 

The mirror was the first thing to go; Deckard’s elbow struck it then Owen’s fist and it went down in a rain of shards all over the floorboards. The jar of pennies on the dresser went next, shattered and spilled coins in all the broken jar glass and mirror glass like a really cheap bank heist gone sideways. Then Deckard put Owen over the top of the sofa and through the cheap plywood coffee table and it was fucking stupid, like they’d decided to audition for the WWE or some-fucking-thing because they tipped over the sofa and sprawled on the floor and Owen’s eye was swelling and Deckard’s fucking lip was split again and it’d only just healed up properly from the last time and then Owen kissed him, got on top of him, straddled his damn hips and _kissed_ him, hot and hard and fucking needy. 

“You’re my brother,” Owen said, practically fucking gasped as he pulled back. And he was hard against him in his overpriced jeans and bruised and bloodied and leaning there over him on his forearms on the penny-littered floor, one leg between Deckard’s. 

“Yeah,” he replied, and Owen was fucking _rubbing_ against him and all he could do was lie there wondering what the fuck this was. 

“You’re my _brother_ ,” Owen repeated. “Shit, Lee. Deckard. _Deckard_. What the fuck kind of name is Deckard?” But he was still rubbing against Deckard’s thigh, his scarred hip up against Deckard’s crotch and fuck if he wasn’t so hard he could he could’ve clubbed him with it like a bloody shillelagh. His mouth was dry and all he wanted to do was fucking cry or put his fist through the wall or through someone’s face. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Owen said and he pulled back and he stumbled up to his feet and Deckard went with him and he thought for a second that that was that but no, apparently no, not nearly. Owen shoved him, hard, right in the chest. He did it again, the look on his face screaming bloody murder and Deckard let him push him, let him shove him straight out of the living room and up against the bedroom door frame till it was jammed straight between his shoulder blades and Owen bit at his neck and sucked at his jaw and then Jesus Christ almighty he was down on his knees and Deckard groaned like a fucking idiot as Owen mouthed at his cock over his jeans. He went down too and they kissed again on their knees, fucking starving, biting, licking, rubbing their damn hips together like oversexed sixth-formers until Owen shoved him down on the floor and straddled his hips and ground his denim-clad arse against his crotch. 

“How well do you know me?” Owen said, yanking his shirt up and off over his head then setting about Deckard’s and oh God, they weren’t stopping.

“Better than I know myself,” he replied, and he was helping him along until he pivoted and tossed Owen down on his back on the rug at the foot of the bed. He stood and he toed his boots off quickly and Owen pulled his off while he was flat on his back, throwing them at him so he had to duck out of the way; another fucking mirror kicked the bucket and Owen laughed and Deckard laughed and it wasn’t even funny, not even a bit, except it was fucking hilarious. 

Somehow, they got their clothes off, pulled them off, Owen lifting his hips on the floor to push his jeans down and Deckard almost tripping himself out of his own then they were on the bed, flushed red and naked and bruised all fucking over and Owen pulled him down on top of him in a clash of limbs till they were kissing again, dizzy and breathless or maybe that was Owen’s hands around his neck, his thumbs over his throat, pressing, insistent, making him giddy, making him fucking high till he pulled back with a gasp and Owen looked up at him like the veritable fucking cat that got the cream. 

“You remembered,” Deckard said. 

“No, and I don’t give a fuck if I never do,” Owen said, as he spread his legs and let Deckard settle in between, as he shifted his hips to rock his erection against his. “ _You_ do. How many men have you killed for me?”

He reached for the lube they apparently both knew was in the drawer by the bed, pushed Deckard up to his knees and then opened the cap.

“Seventy,” he said. “Eighty. How the fuck should I know?”

Owen slicked Deckard’s cock, thickly, quickly, squeezed his balls with his gel-coated hand and made him grimace at that point where pain met pleasure. 

“How many _would_ you kill?”

Deckard laughed, breathlessly, as Owen took his wrist in his hand and squeezed out lube onto his fingers. Owen lay back; Deckard rubbed his fingertips between his cheeks, pressed on into him, tight and hot and willing, as Owen hitched his knees higher. 

“Pretty sure the sky’s the limit,” he said, and Owen’s face was like the end of the goddamn world as he said it, dark and hot and vicious. He’d’ve started a fucking nuclear war for him. He’d already spent a year tracking down every last member of the group who’d taken Owen hostage and shot them all dead on their knees where the last thing they heard was Owen’s name. The Torettos weren’t the first, they were just the latest. All it had really taken was offing the hacker girl first, once he’d had her kill the bloody God’s Eye.

He pushed into him, rough, hard, Owen’s hands going up to grip tight at his biceps and he bottomed out inside him, balls deep and fucking aching. Owen wrapped his legs around his waist and suddenly he was deeper, they were gasping, Deckard rocked against him and _that_ was the end of the world, right there, fucking his baby brother in the bed that he’d bought six months after Israel when Barney Ross had found him, recruited him, and maybe he’d joined because the word _Expendable_ made him laugh, or maybe it was because he’d needed to get out of his brother’s life so bad he’d’ve done anything. They were going to get each other killed one day, saving each other’s lives. Except getting out had only made it worse. 

He came in him, hips jerking, Owen’s fist moving over his dick in between them and twenty seconds later, thirty, they were a filthy fucking mess of sweat and come and blood. Deckard pulled back, pulled out, sat back on his calves and Owen looked up at him, tucking his hands up behind his head with a leisurely smile, bloody well debauched. 

“What’s that look for?” Deckard said, his hands at Owen’s thighs. 

“I think if I’m half the man you think I am, I must be the biggest bastard on the earth,” he replied. “I think I’m the man you think I am because _you’re_ the man I think _you_ are.”

He was right, and Deckard told him so as he stretched out next to him. They’d made each other who they were. Maybe they weren’t made _for_ each other but they were sure as hell made _by_ each other.

They did it again in the morning, Owen straddling his hips, a slow, hard grind with Owen’s hands wrapped tight around his neck, pushed up under his jaw till the room spun around him, till his breath was ragged and Owen kissed what was left of it from his body. If he’d died he’d’ve died damn near ecstatic and Owen smiled and smiled and laughed as they shuddered and jerked and came all over each other but then his expression went dark. 

“Don’t you fucking dare leave here without me,” he said. 

Deckard didn’t ask how he knew because before the coma, Owen would’ve known. All he did was agree.

Maybe one day Owen would remember after all, he thought. And then again maybe he wouldn’t but either way, maybe Deckard didn’t need to dread it the way he had. 

\---

The rumour went round quickly, like most rumours do; Lee Christmas was actually Deckard Shaw and a few of them had heard the name and could pin down at least some of the things that name was reported to have done. Barney scoffed at the idea and from what Deckard could tell, he did a pretty good job of convincing the lads that just because Lee looked a bit like the bloke in question and he’d been there in the dimly-lit room back on the island with _Owen_ Shaw, that didn’t necessarily make him Owen’s big brother. 

“I should know,” Barney said that night, beer in hand. “I’m the jackass who recruited him.” And the lads all chuckled to themselves around the table about the time they’d thought _Lee Christmas_ of all bloody people was some kind of spook. 

Deckard was still around a few days later when Barney gave Owen his tags. There was a machine lying around at Tool’s place with a box of blanks that they used to stamp the new tags and they always had, and while they were out at the bar, over-spiced chicken wings and beer for dinner though that’d never been Owen’s thing, Barney held up a set of brand new tags and dangled them over Owen’s beer. Owen took them with a small smile and an appreciative nod and slipped them on around his neck, tucked them under his jumper with a pat while the lads raised their glasses and bottles in a sort of boozy salute. But Deckard still wasn’t staying. Neither was Owen.

“You don’t have to do this, Lee,” Barney told him, standing outside the bar later on, leaning against the wall by his bike sometime past midnight. Deckard gave him a pointed look and Barney gave a concessionary tilt of his head; they both knew he wasn’t Lee, no matter what his own tags said. “You don’t need to go. Stop being so melodramatic, it ain’t exactly Sophie’s Choice.”

Deckard shrugged and moved over next to him, put one foot up against the wall behind him, leant his head back as he shoved his hands into his pockets. “Yeah, Barn, I know,” he said. “But just wish me luck, yeah? And take care of the lads. You know they’d jump off a bloody cliff if you asked them to.”

“Yeah, so would you,” Barney said. “You did once, remember?”

“Yeah, I’m not likely to forget.” He paused, turned his head. “Y’know, I always liked how you’re the good guys but you carry _really_ big guns.”

Barney snorted. “Yeah, and if you believe that I’ve got a great bridge to sell you,” he said. “We’re not _good_ guys. What the fuck’s a good guy? I’ve lost count of how many guys I’ve killed. Gunner moonlights as a hitman. Yin worked for Chinese intelligence. Y’know Thorn hacked the FBI last week just for shits and giggles and have you talked to Doc about the twisted shit he did that got him locked up?” He shook his head mock-sadly. “Shit, Lee, we’re a gang of seriously demented assholes here. All these years I thought you were paying attention and it turns out you were just talking out of your ass.” 

Deckard chuckled, nudged Barney with his shoulder. “I’d say you’re wise beyond your years, but…”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it, I’m old,” Barney said. “What’s this pick on the elderly shit, Christmas? You wait right here, I’ll beat your ass with my goddamn zimmerframe.” But he reached over and rubbed one hand obnoxiously over Deckard’s stubbly head and all Deckard could do was smile as they pushed and pulled and nudged their way into a half-arsed hug. It was an odd life he’d made there in the States, nothing he’d’ve ever dreamed up for himself but then Barney Ross had come along and made it seem like a viable alternative to mutually assured destruction and for a while, he supposed, it had been. He’d been happyish out there, sometimes, on and off and off and on, being someone else who was enough like him that he couldn’t fuck it up and different enough from him that it’d been like leaving all the bullshit behind. It’d been good for him, maybe, having a real place to live and real friends and an attempt at a relationship and, well, _Barney_. Except it always, always, came back down to Deckard and Owen, Owen and Deckard, the Shaw brothers and all the fucked up things they did with and for and to each other. They were a goddamn public health hazard. They were a trainwreck just waiting to happen because neither one of them knew how to pull on the brake.

“You’re a prince among men, Barn,” Deckard said, clapping Barney on the back with aplomb. 

Barney gave him his best _aw, shucks_ look and pulled away, then chucked him under the chin. “And you’re a sack of shit, Lee Christmas,” he said, and Deckard smiled and Barney chuckled. They both knew he’d used the name on purpose. They both knew sometimes it meant something, and it did right then. “Don’t be a stranger, okay? Keep in touch.”

“You’ll be glad to be rid of me in no time flat,” Deckard said. But they both knew he’d keep in touch anyway. 

He does. It's been three years and every damn day he keeps in touch, texts from airports or a train or the bathtub, calls at 4am because in Europe it’s already 11 o’clock and okay, so Deckard’s always doing it on purpose, but that just means Barney gets to call at 4am too because that’s only around 9pm when he is. Owen likes to bitch about it but he and Barney are on pretty friendly terms, too; sometimes he'll come in and find the two of them on speakerphone having an argument about torque vs horsepower or some-fucking-thing and it's as hilarious as it is bizarre. Owen got his tattoo in New Orleans before they left, right in the same place on his arm as Deckard's. Barney was on hand to make sure it got inked in the right way and somehow that seemed important.

They’ve built a whole new branch of the team out there, a new base of operations run out of their sprawling house somewhere in the woods in the hills not too far south of Munich where they're snowed in over and over again every winter. Owen poses as German and does it pretty well with his accent that's as much Czech as it is Bavarian but that's on purpose just to throw people off in case he ever slips; he came up with a passport that calls him _Oliver Neujahr_ but Deckard’s never got used to calling him Olli and he stoically refuses to be amused by the idea of Christmas and fucking Newyear running the team. But they've got better cover than Barney and the lads back in the States, at least, because Owen had the notion pretty early on of setting up a perfectly legitimate business and it does pretty well, a high-end security consultancy that's worked with military bases and embassies and all that shit all over the world. _Christmas & Neujahr_, security specialists extraordinaire. Their identities have stood up to some serious scrutiny. Maybe the British military shouldn’t have trained them so damn well.

And sometimes, when Barney and the fellas need backup or they do there in Europe or there’s something big that needs all of them or even sometimes just for the hell of it, they get together and Deckard hops into the co-pilot’s seat and they all joke about how Smilee’s just keeping warm for him. They all wear matching dog tags under their shirts, all still stamped on the machine at Tool's, even the ones for the new guys there in Europe because, well, it's team tradition. And when they're asked to do any _really_ bad shit, Owen shrugs and tells him it's up to him so he asks himself what Barney would do before he makes the final decision. He's been so long without a conscience that he supposes a judgmental best friend will do instead. They fly under the radar that way.

So they don't deal drugs and they don't deal arms and the only information they sell is the kind of low-level crap that everyone should know anyway if they've got half a brain and the sense God gave them, and it’s all because they have to have a code, after all. But Deckard takes on hits every now and then and sometimes Owen goes with him and Deckard tells him while they’re on surveillance before it’s time to kill about the time he let him shave his chest in Pakistan or the time he beat up the idiot who'd dislocated his little brother’s shoulder playing rugby. Every time he'd been temporarily banged up at the local nick back home it'd been because of Owen and maybe over the years he's wished he could change that, but these days he's not sure he would. It’s all led them here, after all, to a house in Bavaria where Deckard chops wood outside with a sharpened axe and Owen mocks him because they’ve got a groundskeeper who can do that.

"Will you stop pissing about on your laptop and come to bed?" Owen says, poking his head around the bedroom door. He's let his hair grow even longer now, started wearing glasses though he doesn’t need them. He says it’s because it helps if at least one of them doesn't look exactly like they did when they were wanted in more countries than they could count on fingers and toes, and it’s not like Deckard’s going to grow hair. 

So he closes the laptop with a long-suffering sigh and he leaves the living room. He goes to bed. 

Three weeks ago they went to London for the first time since the hospital. Lee Christmas and Olli Neujahr are perfectly respectable businessmen these days so no one at customs raised a brow or batted an eyelash and they checked into a hotel together in the city, expensive but not the Ritz though when business is as good as it is now it isn't that they can’t afford it. They're wealthy men these days. They stayed the night, had their meeting in the morning and then they hit the three safe houses Deckard knew Owen had had around town. 

There were startled squatters in the first one, a dingy old terrace somewhere in the East End; the maid was in the second, a swanky bachelor pad in Knightsbridge. She smiled and excused herself. They let her go, but only because they knew they weren’t coming back. Then they took a quick ride on the tube, switched onto the DLR and walked out to a shitty flat that was owned in the name of one of Owen's old aliases. Down under the kitchen floorboards under the disused fridge there was a safe, and in the safe there was a lockbox that Owen forced while Deckard watched. He didn’t have the key, didn’t remember the combination.

There was a gun in there, a Walther, the scratches on the barrel strangely familiar and Deckard wondered if it was the one he thought it was, maybe their dad’s, maybe his backup from Israel. There was a book in there and that was _definitely_ familiar. And both book and gun sat on a bed of postcards that made Deckard shake his head with an amused huff. 

"If you weren't my brother, I'd fucking throttle you for keeping those," he said. 

"If you weren't my brother, you wouldn't have sent them in the first place," Owen pointed out. 

He'd written to him for years, from all around the world, from almost every place he'd been. It was like a bloody catalogue of all the jobs he'd ever done, all there on cards from Kenya and Colombia and Cuba, one from Shanghai, one from Stockholm, one from sunny Southend-on-Sea. All he’d ever written was a new string of letters on each card, a code that Owen could translate into numbers with the book he'd left him there in his room that night back in Oxford. He'd figured it out quickly, after the first couple of cards; Owen called him, got his voicemail, left a message.

The first time, all he said was _I got your postcard_. The second time, he said _got a first, going to Sandhurst_. And so it went on, a running commentary on his life in seconds-long messages that Deckard never replied to, not when they were all still _joined the SAS_ or _promoted today_ , not when that stopped and the next thing he’d known Owen was telling him he’d killed three men or he’d stolen from the government or everything he’d ever wanted Deckard to do to him, everything _he’d_ ever wanted to do to _him_. Over the years, the list became surprisingly exhaustive, but they’ve crossed a few things off it since then. 

They burned the postcards in a crap wok in the kitchen and then they flew back to Germany. Owen didn’t remember anything new after that but Deckard’s been telling him everything he knows, piece by piece, year by year. 

It’s not perfect. They both know someday the wrong person will find out they’re not who they say they are and it’ll end in blood and tears and gunfire and it might even be theirs. But he’d tear down the whole damn world or die trying for his brother and maybe, one day, he will; for now, he’ll go to bed and they’ll fuck till they’re sweaty and maybe later he’ll tell Owen again how he broke his boyfriend’s neck back in Oxford just for putting his hands on him and then, he thinks, they’ll go again because that story always gets his brother hard. 

“You’re an impatient bastard,” Deckard says, as he gets into bed. The boxers he’s still wearing won’t last long.

“I think I’ve been patient enough,” Owen replies, pulling him down. His smile’s sharp as Lee’s knives; sometimes he makes him use them. Sometimes he makes him answer to that name.

They’re a trainwreck waiting to happen but what he knows now is it’s already been happening for years. All he’s ever done is delay the inevitable and maybe, somehow, pulling apart just ramped up the speed. 

They’re a trainwreck waiting to happen but for now, he’ll just sit back and enjoy the ride.


End file.
